Google went down Thursday morning, and now Friday morning again!

It's better now but people couldn't get or could barely get search Gmail, Google Apps, Google News, Google Reader, Google Maps, Google Analytics, heck, even google.com and YouTube.

It's unclear how wide-spread the failure was.

CNet thinks it was worldwide but one post from Google called it a "small subset of users." That may have been before the problem escalated.

Microsoft Live Search sent its sympathies to Google servers.

Reuters wrote a great lead that read "Perhaps you may have noticed the seas boiling red with blood, the whore of Babylon rising and the Antichrist roaming the Earth, strewing carnage in his wake" because Google crashed.

There was speculation that it was a massive denial of service attack.

Finally operations SVP Urs Hoelzle came up with the following explanation: "Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

"An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and ‘always on,' so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again. All planes are back on schedule now."